How you justify an engineering team is strong team?

Question

Hi all,

In the leadership round of my onsite interview at Pinterest, the manager asked me how to justify an engineering team as a strong team.

I don't know how to answer this question well.

My answer was considering a team as a unit function:

Input: effective manager, strong tech lead, impacted project
output: team member tenure, promotion within the team, achievement
algorithm: strong communication/collaboration, team goal aligned

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

This is a very deep question and one that actually came up quite a bit as we navigated the idea maze for Taro in 2022! A very common question that a CTO or eng lead will get is:

How effective is our eng team compared to other teams of a similar size? Is our engieering team effective given our investment in them?

Turns out, this is very hard to measure. The most "obvious" answer to look at things like lines of code or number of PRs submitted is riddled with problems. But questions about the health of the overall business are too disconnected from the engineering team.

A common theme I heard from the answers I got was that answering the above question was too difficult. Instead, a good approximation for developer effectiveness was simply developer satisfaction. So we could simply look at the survey results of developers asking them questions like how productive they feel and how they enjoy their work.

I'd also point you to https://getdx.com/, which is a fairly well-known company now that does research into developer experience and productivity.

FWIW, I think your answer is solid.

How you justify an engineering team is strong team?

Discussion